by Massive Voodoo

MV Core Painting Techniques start from the roots, from where every painter one day started:Painting up your first miniature, ever!

In
this video we will explain to you to find maximum fun and painting joy
while painting up your first miniature, ever! For a boardgame, for
roleplaying, like Dungeons and Dragons or just for the fun of it! In
future videos we will bring you new ideas, techniques and inspiration how you can improve your
painting skills. If you want to follow us on this journey sign up to your MV youtube channel!

Important: We never mean any offence/disrespect/joking on anyone enjoying miniature painting by starting so basic in this tutorial. We want to spread the joy about miniature painting beyond well known horizons and a journey has to start somewhere :)

Enjoy the video and let's start your own journey - we can only show you directions, you have to find your own paths through the jungle! Ough! Ough!

by Roman aka jar

Good Morning Jungle,

I finished another fun paintjob on a Hasslefree Sculpt.
Did I tell you that I love to paint up Hasslefrees? Give one a try yourself and you will quickly see what I mean. Great characters, sculpted in beautiful poses, ready for some light and shadow play.

This one was a little weird first, I got to get used to his "dress", but he is funny nonetheless :D
Hope you like him!

Lunatic is loose!

___________________________________

by Roman Lappat

single figure in 28 mm, Hasslefree, on gaming base, painted in acrylics.

by Massive Voodoo

Good Morning Jungle,today Oli aka Honourguard takes you through an awesome step by step of one of his wonderful bases. Oli is famous for his delicate little wonders of bases and we wish you all a lot of fun with this article!

In this step by step tutorial I want to show you the different steps how I create many of my fantasy bases. Maybe you can take this as inspiration for further projects.

So lets start, at the beginning
I always chose the models I want to paint and think about a scenerey where I would like to see them. I chose a display socket, it should not be to big, but neither to small too. There is no mathematic rule for the size, it just should fit in your opinion. On the next steps I often make a drawing of the scenery, think about the positions of different elements and of the figures. You can also write down some notes. When you work on a project, always be open for changes. Everything can happen during a project (new ideas, something doesn't fit to the rest..). That can mean to change figures or remove basing elments. It is important to keep the whole project in mind as one picture or element, even when you work on different small tasks. Bigger projects need a lot of time. That's why I am not scared of adding more work if I have to change anything. Because I always try to get the best result or a result that fits to my ideas, conceptions and wishs.

It is important to get interesting surfaces on the base. Then it is easier to paint it in the further steps. I used wood barks, roots and common earth. On this step also think about the plains at the side. I use sandpaper to get a very smooth surface. That's important for an clean general view. This surfaces represent the sides of the landscape break-out. I burnished them with sandpaper, first with rough and later with finer sandpaper.

I always try to get interesting surfaces on the base (for example the stone texture, or a stone-flagged road). That makes painting easier it in the further steps, because you can work a lot with washes, pigments and some kind of dry-brushing. I used Milliput, wood bark, roots and common earth for the base.

In the past, I always painted my figures first, and when I finished them, I created the base. But I think it is much better to create the figure with the base. Than you always have a good overview over the "complete" project.

The painting process started with a thin layer of Tamiya Grey Primer. After that I used my airbrush to bring some colours to the base and to create the first lights. It is important to set lights cenital but also light up the areas where the figures are placed later. That helps us to catch the focus to the figure.

The airbrush work was still very rough, I worked out the different lights and shadows. I painted the edges of the stones and trees with a brush, because the edges are always brighter than the plane surface..as long they don't lie in a shadow area. After that I added a lot of washes, with different green tones and some brown for the trees/bushes. You can also add washes with pigments, or AK-Washs on the areas that represent earth later. I do that because I don't want that all areas have exactly the same color (trees, bushs, stone, earth, sea ground).

Nature-Basing

Often I got asked how I create the plants on my base, there is not just one foliage that you can use for everything, I work with really many products, I use only small parts and built up the scene. I can recommand you to buy the most basing materials on model rail road stores, because they are much cheaper and you will get packages, that rest a really long time. Companies I use: Wooland scenics, Heki, Noch, Busch, Polakmodel..

That's a really nice product from Polakmodel I like to work with, they offer different meadow types.

Adding more green step by step, a bush here, some dosh there.

As you can see I have many different products for my bases. The good part in our miniature hobby is that you only need small amounts of the materials, so they will rest for a long time. The foliages you can see on this picture are from Polakmodel.

Here you can see how I have created small randomly grass tufts. I mixed grass fibres of Noch. I took some of them between my fingers, rolled them and put a bit superglue in the middle. Than let it dry and cut it in two pieces. Now you have random grass tufts in a few seconds. It is important to know that everything in the nature grows different and individual. It doesn't look good if you want to create a meadow with 10 single grass tufts and all are looking perfectly round, with the same lenght and the same color. Sometimes I glued single fibres on the base with a tweezer.

Water Effects
I have added some reeds to the quite water areas and added some green/blue washes to the sea ground. After that I worked on the waterfalls and the water effect. After that I added more arylic texture gel to create volume on the big waterfall. Not easy to work with the water effects, I still have problems with bubbles and harden out sometimes. I use 2K water effects from Noch.

And here are the last pictures of my finished diorama. In the last steps, I added the figures, some mouse bones, leaf, a thin layer with dark brown and pigments. And some AK-Interactive colors to give the stones the final touch. What's also nice is too add some small animals or some mushrooms for example or other small details, which could look nice on your base.

by Roman aka jar

What is the code word?

Right, word up!

No romance for me and colors today - little relaxing from my 50th MV's Jar's painting class weekend (which was wonderful, thanks to everyone involved!). I returned home tonight at 3 o'clock, but already see me working on some mails and important future stuff.

by Massive Voodoo

Hey everyone!

You may already noticed that we completely overhauled our studio.
We sanded the floor, we painted the walls and removed and sorted every piece of storage furniture and box we had. Here is the full story!

Now Raffa will tell you a little bit more about the biggest change in the studio. The new painting table. Enjoy and listen to Raffa ...

As one more painter moved into the studio, Erik, we really needed to change something about our table.

What we wanted:
- 4 big work places
- At least 2-4 guest work places
- New light from above
- Very stable
- In the middle of the room

We had no choice but to build a table ourself.
After some ideas we chose a big O-shaped table for four big places and two guest places.

In our experience a good work place has a depth of at least 60 cm and a width of 100-110 cm.
Our old table was 2,20m long and had a depth of 1,10m

For the new table we wanted more space so we increased the length to 2,40m.

And because we have a cover in the middle we even have more depth than 60cm.
60cm is the depth we had available because we wanted to use countertop pieces which have that depth.

The height of the table is around 84cm. This ensures we are sitting upright while working on don't put unnecessary stress on our backs.

So we went to the home depot and did a big shopping tour. We already knew that the project wouldn't be cheap, but as we split the cost by four it was still ok.

These are the beams we will use as the legs for the table. We bought six (even if there are only five on the photo ... )

The long sides of the table, 2,40x60cm

The short sides with 80x60cm. We had to cut off the rounded edge side of the pieces or otherwise it would have looked very strange so actually they have more like 80x58cm.

We cut out six pieces of 20x20x2cm wood pieces to screw on top of the legs.

Using a pencil we marked the drill spots. Four drill holes in the middle to attach the plate to the leg and four holes to attach the plate to the table.

The back side of the plate...

Long, strong screws were used to put everything togehter.

The finished legs for the table.

The next step was to attach three of the legs to each table side. One in the middle...

And two on the outer corners.

And they already stand, but not very securely, there are still the sides missing!

Now we turned the pieces around and attached the small sidepieces with wooden beams from below.

Like this!

We also screwed on some corner pieces to support the center cover.

We tried to fit the side pieces as closely to the rest as possible to avoid gaps.

That's the result so far, the veneer on the sides of the table is still missing.

Now the frame for the lamps was prepared. We used four wooden beams and added hooks to hang it from the ceiling.

We noticed the table is still a bit shaky, so we prepared two more support beams to connect the two central legs, that should fix the shaking.

We attached power strips to each corner leg so every painter has his own power outlet where he can attach his tools like the dremel / proxxon, hairdryer, etc.

The support beams were attached to the legs.

Using clamps, we fixed the legs before drilling the holes for the screws.

That looks a lot sturdier. All shaking and flexing was gone after this step.

We added one big, red switch to switch all the electrical tools and lamps of the table on and off with one click :-)

The cabling for everything was fixed directly under the table to avoid chaos and "Kabelsalat" (google that :D )

One of the two main power strips powering the lamps and airbrush compressors.

The cable to connect everything with a wall plug was hidden under a strip of metal so you don't trip over it.

Now we added the central cover, with holes to attach the lamps from the inside of the table.
That keeps the outer edge of the table clean of lamps. We also made sure the holes are big enough to attach and detach the lamps without removing the cover.

Here you see how the cover looks from underneath. There are still two more support beams missing that we added for more stability. There is still the central hole with the trash bin missing. We will add that as soon as the giant funnel arrives :)
We will be able to play basketball with trash to hit the center of the table... awesome!

Now this is how the table looks with a first test of a work place.
You can see the table in action in this video :)

We hope you enjoyed this insight into how we build our big table!
Maybe you build your next painting table by yourself, too?

It is very important to have some space and feel comfortable in your painting area, if you don't... change it!

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Welcome to the Jungle...

... MASSIVE VOODOO’s jungle, where some apes share their thoughts and ideas around their beloved passion, the hobby of miniature painting and sculpting.

Feel welcome to come and check the jungle for tons of articles, interesting tutorials, creative competitions and the simple joy of happy painting hidden behind every tree. We hope that everyone finds their own banana in here, if not do not hesitate to ask the apes. We are more than happy for you to post in the comments section to help turn this jungle into the lush, overgrown painting corner we hope it will become.